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Towards Sustaining the Status Quo: Business Talk of Sustainability in Finnish Corporate Disclosures 1987–2005

2009; Routledge; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09638180903136258

1468-4497

Matias Laine,

Ethics in Business and Education

Abstract The paper seeks to shed more light on how businesses have used the language of sustainability in their disclosures. The study employs interpretive textual analysis and takes a closer look at how the corporate talk of sustainability has developed in the disclosures of three major Finnish companies during the period 1987–2005. In-depth understanding is sought by limiting the analysis of disclosures from four anchor points only. The findings indicate major changes in the ways the case corporations have used sustainability-related concepts over the two decades. Over time sustainability seems to have transformed from a possibly revolutionary concept into an evolutionary one, if not to one merely concerned with sustaining of the status quo. Moreover, whereas in the early disclosures the conceptualisation of sustainability appears to be rather polyphonic, in more recent years the companies use fairly similar rhetoric drawing on the discourse of weak sustainability. As a longitudinal study the paper makes a contribution to the still relatively limited body of research deconstructing corporate social and environmental disclosures from an interpretive standpoint. However, the study focuses only on the disclosures of three case companies in one particular country, and thus the generalisation of the findings must be approached with caution. Acknowledgements The author is grateful for the constructive comments provided on earlier versions of the paper by Editor Salvador Carmona, two anonymous reviewers, Salme Näsi, Hannele Mäkelä, Oana Apostol, Nelson Phillips and the participants of the parallel sessions at the 18th IABS Annual Congress in Florence, June 2007; the 31st EAA Annual Congress in Rotterdam, April 2008; and the 2nd Conference on Qualitative Research Methods in Vaasa, May 2008. An early version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of the 18th IABS Annual Congress. Moreover, the help of Johanna Heiskanen with the data analysis and of Virginia Mattila with the English language is gratefully acknowledged. This research is a part of the RespMan Project, funded by the Liike2 Research program of the Academy of Finland. Financial support was also generously provided by the Finnish Graduate School of Accounting, Finnish Foundation of Economic Education (Liikesivistysrahasto) and the Marcus Wallenberg's Foundation for Business Studies. The usual caveat applies. Notes For the sake of simplicity the concepts of sustainable development and sustainability are here used largely interchangeably, even though one could perhaps see a problem in the indiscriminate use of sustainability-related concepts in a paper focusing on how the very same concepts are used in corporate disclosures. The Finnish versions have been the primary source and the analysis presented in this paper is based on them. In providing the quotations the English versions of the reports have been consulted if they have been available. However, the quotations have been taken directly from the English versions only if the author had assessed the meaning to be similar in both versions. In other cases the quotations have been taken from the Finnish version and have been translated by the author in order to remain consistent with the analysis. See also note 4. At the time the research assistant was a Ph.D. student in accounting with a special interest in human relations and social accounting. In this quotation there is a clear difference in the emphasis of the Finnish and English versions. The English version of the annual report reads as follows: 'A responsible approach to business not only contributes to achieving business objectives, it also reflects a company's commitment to operating in accordance with its values and sustainably' (Neste AR, 2005 English version, p. 30). Furthermore, the company appears to use the terms 'responsibility' and 'sustainability' interchangeably: a subtitle which reads 'On Responsibility Reporting' in the Finnish version has transformed to 'Sustainability Reporting' in the otherwise equivalent English version (Neste AR, 2005 Finnish version, p. 30; author's translation; Neste AR, 2005 English version, p. 30). The Finnish version is used here in order to be consistent with the other years. However, on a more general level it might be worth studying how much the different versions of annual reports portrayed to be identical actually vary in terms of language use (see Campbell et al., 2005 Campbell, D., Beck, C. and Shrives, P. 2005. A note on comparative language interrogation for content analysis: the example of English vs German. British Accounting Review, 37(3): 339–350. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). A cynic might ask whether the environmental objectives really are so ambitious, as many of those reported to be targets in five years' time in 2009 appear already to have been achieved during 2005, the first year of the period.